Feeling great and remaining fit and healthy is better than anything tastes

Your health is all about the food. Not a little bit, all of it. Expert Natasha Hodge from Natasha is Wide-Eyed, explains why food is the key to your nutrition.

When it comes to giving you the truth, I’m not going to sugar coat it (in fact sugar would be nowhere near any of my advice!). The food you eat over your lifetime is the difference between dancing a jig at your great great grandchild’s wedding aged 95 or being riddled with any number of diseases and ailments from midlife onwards.

Running a nutrition business, I am constantly trying to work out how to get this point across. Mostly I have used the tack of being upbeat and leading by example, but I don’t think that works. Everywhere I look the mixed messages from all different directions makes it nigh on impossible to land the message.

Frustration is an understatement. The fact that your body requires nutrients, vitamins and minerals that it recognises and can use to repair and rebuild you daily is not an optional decision. And yet every day the vast majority of the UK treat it in that way by choosing to consume foods that have been altered in ways that mean the body has to try to deal with and cope with the ongoing bombardment. Until it doesn’t, cope that is, and that’s when your health takes a nosedive.

If you value your health whatsoever, I recommend that you don’t just take my advice, you read it in a book called “Metabolical” by Dr Robert Lustig. His take on sugar and its harmful effects was one of the reasons I got into nutrition 9 years ago. But this book succinctly brings everything I have learned over the period together in one place. This is a doctor whistle blowing that the medical system will not help you, it will only mask the symptoms not treat the cause of your ill health. The cause is the food you eat.

Sugar and its effect on your master hormone insulin cause havoc in every cell and vegetable oils are causing damage to your DNA leading to the global pandemic of rising chronic disease. As Dr Lustig says, it’s not the foods that cause the problems, it is what has been done to the food that is the issue. If they put a health label on a processed food the rule of thumb is that it is far from healthy. The original ingredients might have been healthy but put them through an industrial process and they are no good for your body.

Sugar and starch are addictive, and the food industry knows this and manipulates the flavours and advertising to enhance your cravings. It doesn’t help that we have set up a whole belief system that excuse our addiction to these foods. Endemic phrases such as “A little of what you fancy won’t hurt” and “Everything in moderation”. And then there’s incentivising children with the promise of sweets so we have the next generation heading for health disaster. ‘Treating’ yourself at the end of a long day, just because and in the guise of self-love. But self-love would be to not cause yourself harm, wouldn’t it?

Processed food is self-harm.

Feeling great and remaining fit and healthy is better than anything tastes, and it lasts a lot longer.  But don’t forget that real food also tastes fantastic so it’s a what would you really have to give up?

To make the move to real food today to improve your health outcomes visit natashaiswideeyed.com for free recipes, articles, and videos to treat yourself to a bigger slice of life.

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